John Buell – Informed Commenthttps://www.juancole.com
Thoughts on the Middle East, History and ReligionSun, 15 Sep 2019 07:13:06 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.9.11The Politics of the Local Weather Broadcast: Call your Station and Demand News of Climate Crisishttps://www.juancole.com/2019/09/politics-weather-broadcast.html
Tue, 10 Sep 2019 04:02:14 +0000https://www.juancole.com/?p=186241
(Informed Comment) – Many of us rely on daily reports, often presented by local TV weatherpersons, to get through our daily routines. How do I dress, do I need to take an umbrella to work, must I come home early to avoid the snowstorm? These professionals have a difficult job. Their predictions are generally correct and quite useful the vast majority of the time, but most of us tend to remember only the mistakes. Nonetheless local weather and the local stations and broadcasters are more trusted than national networks.

As extreme weather events become more common and the tools that portray these events in real time become more sophisticated and graphic weather segments are likely to become more watched and TV meteorologists more influential for good or ill. Let’s hope the local stars rise to the occasion because the national networks remain strangely silent on climate science. A recent study of major networks performance during Dorian reported by Common Dreams indicated: “Even as Hurricane Dorian tore through the Bahamas and crept up the southeastern U.S. seaboard, broadcast news networks were loathe to connect the powerful storm’s strength to the climate crisis in spite of the science linking warmer sea surface temperatures to increased frequency of strong hurricanes.

According to a study by watchdog Media Matters For America, only CBS aired a segment tying climate change to hurricane activity like Dorian’s. NBC and ABC aired no such programs. “ And CBS aired only one short segment.

Weatherpersons and/or their bosses may not wish to admit this, but they already make political choices and their programs are contestable space. One of the obvious ways in which weather broadcasts are political is the ways in which they deal with climate science denialism. In a large national survey of weatherpersons:” Four in ten (40%) weathercasters present an “opposing viewpoint” at least sometimes when reporting climate change information: 10% do so “always or almost always;” 12% do so “most of the time;” 7% do so “about half the time;” and 11% do so “less than half the time.” Only 24% do so “never or rarely”

These results are distressing. Demialism is a cult not a science, and treating it as legitimate dissent within the scientific community is dishonest and dangerous. Even ExxooMobil has known for a generation that human- made climate change is real. Persistent denial presented as science only serves to confuse the public and delay badly needed actions. Weatherpersons need to be connecting their discussions and descriptions of ongoing weather events to the backdrop of a warming climate.

One opportunity to educate by connecting rare events and contemporary climate science is the stunning duration of some of these dangerous weather systems. Remember when we could all breathe a sigh of relief when a tropical system came ashore. We would expect that it would soon dissipate as rain showers, inconvenient but no big deal. These now often linger for days and become epic floods. Changes in the jet stream, modulated in part by warming of the Arctic air masses, plays an important though not fully understood role in these periodic weather events. (Climate scientist Michael Mann discussed this example at more length on a recent Democracy Now program.)In my own sporadic viewing of the Weather Channel coverage of Donian this theme received no attention.

Global warming has clear distributional impacts/ .Jonathan Patz, Public health expert, at the University of Wisconsin points out: “There are so many pathways through which climate impacts our health.’ Those pathways include heat, air pollution, extreme weather, vector-borne diseases, and access to safe water and food. The health risks posed by climate change already disproportionately harm marginalized groups including people with disabilities or infirmities, low-income families and individuals – and climate change is likely to deepen those disparities.”

Many weatherpersons would maintain that they are not political, they just present the weather facts. In this regard I would ask these media figures to consider a rather typical weather segment. During the extreme heat wave this past summer WNBC meteorologist Dave Price called attention to the severity of the heat and then told viewers to “flip on the AC.” For me the casual tone of the recommendation coupled with the use of initials suggest he was dealing with a normal part of life we all know about and can relate to. But focusing on individual solutions, especially ones that may burden the most vulnerable, is a political choice, one that distracts the citizenry from other more egalitarian and more effective choices. Alternatively a weather segment might have dealt with Green roofs and community shelters. Were the latter emphasized and promoted as essential for all New Yorkers their quality would surely be upgraded.

Some meteorologists and their bosses maintain that presenting the dire facts about global warming will turn off many viewers, who will then turn off or hit the remote. That fear cannot be discounted but is less likely when the words are spoken by a trusted member of the community and, more importantly, when constructive alternatives are presented. Global warming is a serious risk but also an opportunity to make changes that could improve the quality of life.

If weatherpersons have a professional and civic responsibility to connect the distant and abstract notion of global warming to events in our daily lives, we citizen viewers also have an obligation. It would be naïve to think that local station managements and owners will encourage or even allow their trained professionals to exercise their best judgments and present stories that highlight connections between weather emergencies and global warming. Corporate and management reticence is not just a matter of the obscene level of fossil fuel ad dollars going to the corporate media. The broader science, in connection with ongoing crises, suggests the limits of our growth and consumer driven society. That message is anathema to the media however essential to our ears. So we best do what they won’t and monitor our local meteorologists and make our voices heard.

]]>Trump’s Dismantling of our Government: Deregulating our Way to Disasterhttps://www.juancole.com/2019/06/dismantling-government-deregulating.html
Mon, 24 Jun 2019 04:06:21 +0000https://www.juancole.com/?p=184898
(Informed Comment) – While Trump’s xenophobic and protectionist agenda, thankfully often blocked by the courts, has received the lion’s share of media attention, his henchmen have enacted a whole series of game changing initiatives in the area of federal regulation.

Deregulating such domestic concerns as transportation, occupational health and safety, the environment is hardly new. At least since the Reagan Administration every Republican President has promised to remove regulations. What is unusual if not literally unique about the Trump presidency is the scope of the deregulatory initiatives, the willingness to expand federal power in behalf of its deregulatory agenda, and the explicit, emphasis on profits as the goal of deregulation. One little corner of the regulatory universe illustrates the logic—and the dangers—of the deregulatory agenda. The Department of Transportation’s Federal Railroad Administration has repealed one of the last Obama era regulations still on the book, a requirement that freight and passenger trains have two engineers on each.

Justin Mikulka, DeSmoog Blog reported that freight rail corporations, along with the American Petroleum Institute argued that the companies running the trains are in the best position to assess safety requirements and should be given the flexibility to do so. Worker, safety, and environmental advocates maintain that modern technology makes the engineer’s job more stressful and that fatigue is a major risk factor for long distance shipments, making a second engineer indispensible Freight corporations did concede that in the event of a crash, the second engineer would be helpful. Nonetheless they countered that first responders could fill any vacuum there.

The communities in the path of these potentially lethal “train bombs” are not enthusiastic about this responsibility. They are being charged with an extremely costly response in an era that—compliments of the neoliberal deregulators– places a premium on austerity and small government. As for the rail companies’ interest in a grass roots approach to safety, the fate, usually firing, of employees’ reporting significant safety issues is not reassuring.

Nor should we take seriously the deregulators hostility to big government. Many state and local governments have been worried about the extreme risks embodied by these trains and have enacted their own regulations. Unfortunately the corporate deregulators have asserted the right of federal legislation to preempt state statutes and the courts have reaffirmed this right. An assertion of the right to preempt is a blow not only to this particular policy agenda but to one of the major sources of reform. In federal systems state governments have led to way for reform. Witness the role of California in air and vehicle regulations or Saskatchewan’s contribution to Canadian healthcare.

That these steps will make our rails safer seems very unlikely. On occasion the deregulators make their motives explicit. Mikulk quotes Rep. Bill Shuster, who championed finding ways to “allow the railroad industry to keep more of their profits” at a hearing on pipeline and rail regulations.

Mikulka adds:”With rail companies now comfortably positioned to self-regulate under the Trump administration, the industry can continue its long (and, at times, bloody) history of putting profits over safety.

In effect DOT has made Milton Friedman’s commandment that the central task of corporate leadership is to maximize shareholder value. Public policy scholar Marshall Auerbach and pilot Gregory Travis provide a concise summary of Friedan’s political economy and its implications.

For Milton Friedman “shareholders, being the owners and the main risk-bearing participants, ought therefore to receive the biggest rewards. Profits therefore should be generated first and foremost with a view toward maximizing the interests of shareholders, not the executives or managers who (according to the theory) were spending too much…time worrying about employees, customers, and the community at large. Institutional investors devised solutions to ensure the primacy of enhancing shareholder value, via the advocacy of hostile takeovers, the promotion of massive stock buybacks… (which increased the stock value), higher dividend payouts and, most importantly, the introduction of stock-based pay for top executives in order to align their interests to those of the shareholders. These ideas were influenced by the idea that corporate efficiency and profitability were impinged upon by archaic regulation and unionization…”

When maximizing shareholder value and volatile stock markets are combined, dangerous consequences often follow. Journalists studying Boeing’s disaster have compared a good design that would have avoided with Boeing’s dangerous shortcuts. Lambert Strether of the blog Naked Capitalism reports that the bad 737 design “yielded Boeing a profit margin of 21 percent per aircraft sold. By contrast, a “good” design, which properly incorporated better safety features, yielded a profit of 19 percent per aircraft. That doesn’t sound like that much of a decrease….But it represents a 2 percent reduction in profit margins. When you evaluate that against the fact that the 737 program accounts for nearly half of all of Boeing’s profits and [corporate financial officers] have told Wall Street that they can conjure 1 percent to 1.5 percent annual profit increases, company-wide, the actions undertaken by Boeing’s senior management begin to make sense…. Boeing wouldn’t have met its profit forecasts, which may have affected the stock price.”

What conclusions can we draw from these tales of transit political economy?

A These are not unusual. Deregulation, spurred by and in turn reinforcing a faith in shareholder value drives the urge to open the arctic wildlife regulation to drilling and to build a pipeline to bring the crude to market. On the other end of the petro pipeline deregulatory and shareholder enthusiasm propel the demand to relax fuel economy standards.

B. Talk about big government versus little is misleading. Federal deregulation of freight rail is impossible without federal government restrictions of local initiatives. Police power will also be key to completion of many of these projects, and federal aid will be essential in the likely event of accidents. Boeing would not exist without massive military spending and probably will not survive without some form of federal bailout/

C .Why do congressional committees and high- level civil servants in effect cede their power to corporate leaders? Follow the money. This is not merely a matter of campaign contributions. Money is spent on lobbying and the revolving door creates opportunities for eager deregulators. But more even than these inducements is the disproportionate presence of these corporations in the corporate media. When Exxon and Koch industries can routinely and without challenge portray themselves as friends of the climate something is amiss.

D Ideas matter There was money to be made in the post New Deal welfare state and many grasped those opportunities. But ideas like Friedman’s also energized and gave purpose to a whole generation. Opposing deregulation is necessary but not sufficient. How can markets, government at all levels, and corporations be restructured so that they can respond to evolving community needs?

E One specific example. Environmental and workplace regulation, though necessary, is often not very nimble. How does policy address this limitation without falling into the deregulation pit. One can imagine requiring a safety committee composed of workers, outside experts protected against firing and having access to all production standard. This committee would have the right to stop production.

F. Money can move but plants and factories not so easily. Direct action, including plant and warehouse seizures are an increasing possibility and would reshape the regulatory environment.

]]>How Neoliberalism & Privatization are Driving our Crises, from Guatemala to Moscowhttps://www.juancole.com/2019/06/neoliberalism-privatization-guatemala.html
Mon, 03 Jun 2019 04:18:23 +0000https://www.juancole.com/?p=184434To the corporate media, history goes back only as far as yesterday. Thus the media portray the chaos and violence in Central America as though this is just a case of stuff happens. Or all of a sudden millions decided to come north in search of a better life. And these exculpatory views survived even amidst the elevation of Elliott Abrams, the war criminal architect of brutal Central American policy late last century. It is imperative for peace and social justice activists to fill this gap and to ask just what stake media and elites have in continued amnesia.

Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now has done consistently good reporting on the historical dimension of the crisis in Central America. These comments by human rights advocate Jennifer Harbury during a recent Democracy Now interview were especially moving:

“so many of the high-level Guatemalan intelligence leaders of that era, who were trained in the School of the Americas and who served as CIA paid informants, also had slowly, but surely, become involved in the drug trade and, after the war, rose to the top and started their own cartels….So, we created these Frankensteins. We trained them. We taught them torture techniques. We funded them, and we armed them. They don’t much need our money anymore. And they’re devouring the country using the same techniques of torture and the terror that they used before. Once again, everyone is roaring north. Could we stop the true cause, which is them? We could, but we won’t. We’re not releasing files that would put them in jail. We still have relationships with the army that, one by one, keep showing up as being extremely involved in the gangs.”

And the same amnesia that aids corporate sponsored violence in Central America enables silent deaths in t Russia. Putin is the devil incarnate to Western media, but few inquire about the ideology and policy that created a whole cadre of billionaire oligarchs including Putin himself. They were beneficiaries of one of the great economic transformations that regulation- averse Chicago school economists promised us would benefit the great majority of Soviet people.

Instead privatization led to the spin-off of Soviet assets to Kremlin cronies. Private monopolies replaced public ones, and life for ordinary citizens became disastrously worse. Russian society went through an event utterly unprecedented in a peacetime economy— – a fall off of six years in mean life expectancy. The Russians had their own experience of deaths of despair long before the US crisis identified by Nobel laureates Anne Case and Angus Deaton.

If history can tell the left anything it should be that we can’t predict when and where the next economic crisis will occur, but that a downturn is sure. Just as importantly we can be certain that Republicans and many neoliberal Democrats will wring their hands over exploding government deficits, albeit deficits that are a product of private sector “irrational exuberance” or even criminality.

The Left needs to present its own well- documented narratives— – starting now before even a modest recession is in full swing. When recession does come, infrastructure will be up for discussion, both as to the amount of investment and the role of private capital. Labor, environmental, and social justice advocates need to take the lead in reminding the media and the public of neoliberalism’s false promise regarding the privatization of key stat assets. And we cannot point out often enough the price in human lives Russians paid for the obscene affluence gained by a tiny few, including Putin himself

Economic hard times will also encourage two other destructive “cures” Foreign aggression and austerity. Fiscal scolds, who never seem to surface during tax cut times, will likely complain hysterically when recession occasions declining government revenues and increased expenditures. Before such choruses begin we need to remind citizens that cutting budgets in the face of recession only makes things worse. Witness Europe’s experience during the world financial crisis 2008, when austerity turned a recession in much of the continent into a 1930s style Depression and with it fertile soil for the re-emergence of home grown fascism in several EU members.

Economic crisis and hypernationalism led to war in the last century. In the US, war or the threat of war in many global theatres seems to be a permanent condition. This too has not only delivered nothing that was promised but has left death and destruction coupled with increasing hostility to the US. Neoliberal elites have a stake in continued amnesia. It hides the central role violence and repression have played in establishing so called market freedoms. Neoliberal privatization and austerity, backed by the hard fist of militarization, have an ugly track record of which we must remind citizens early and often.

]]>Dems must Step Up: Trumpism requires Impeachment and Confrontationhttps://www.juancole.com/2019/05/trumpism-impeachment-confrontation.html
Mon, 13 May 2019 06:58:40 +0000https://www.juancole.com/?p=183998This past spring my alma mater—- Amherst College– attracted attention for a question that is likely to emerge on many private college campuses. Should former attorney general Jeff Sessions or other alt-right advocates be allowed to speak at the college? Though such questions are often portrayed as a First Amendment issue, Amherst, a private college, is not required to provide space and resources to speakers of any persuasion,.

Were this a question of a public facility where any party meeting minimal requirements, such as notification in advance, would be allowed to speak, denying Sessions a platform would raise serious legal and constitutional issues. In the Amherst College’s decision to allow Sessions to speak struck many as contrary to the spirit of the college.

The occasion served to amplify the views of a racist misogynist whose whole career has been devoted to the exclusion of the most vulnerable citizens. Some students staged a planned walkout, but as political scientist Thomas Dumm pointed out faculty were by and large reluctant to become engaged: And their thinking is mirrored in other reams and issues of contemporary politics. Dumm commented:

“The reluctance on the part of my colleagues to directly confront and condemn the purveyor of hate on our campus seemed to stem from a worry that we were being “trolled” by the Right, and that to condemn Sessions would be to “Play into their hands.” Such reasoning seemed to be based on the idea that there is a point at which placating, rather than condemning, will allow us to proceed in peace with our work, so that the hate machines and institutions of the far right will move on.

But as has been becoming increasingly clear, we are being confronted in the United States with a major political party that embraces tactics of earlier fascist parties—of intimidation, voter suppression, personal threat, using the internet not only to troll but to dox those who speak against them, issuing death threats against public opponents of their hate, using instruments of state power to threaten defunding of programs. They will continue these tactics regardless of any placating tactics we may adopt.” (For more details see http://c.blogspot.com/2019/05/jeff-sessions-at-amherst-college.html)

To Dumm’s comments on the fascist leanings and practices of many current Republicans I would only add the role and practices of the Senate majority leader, who on Obama’s becoming president saw as his primary task assuring the total failure of that administration, regardless of consequences for the nation. And beyond legislative strategies toward that end he has worked doggedly to remake federal courts. Before pushing Brett Kavanaugh through the Senate he denied well- respected centrist judge Merrick Garland even a hearing. And at the district court level Republicans seek to convert the court system into a body that not only will not impede but actually will advance the Trump exclusionary agenda.

Nonetheless the Senate minority leader and his followers still believe they can play ball with a president who vilifies their base, deems their leaders “treasonous” and shuts government down in order to advance his own repressive agenda. Thus Democrats have done little to impede McConnell’s packing the federal court

Now Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi are cheering the president’s renewed willingness to negotiate a massive infrastructure package. This celebration is at best premature and at worst exceedingly naïve. As Indiana University political scientist Jeffrey Isaac puts it “there can be no statesmanship from a man who hates the state—- except when it can enrich him and harm those he dislikes.” This is a leader who thought nothing of shutting down government and doing immense harm in order to get his way.

Trump’s turn to the state has both a short and long term goal. In the short term it is intended as a distraction from the many investigations now confronting Trump. In the long run Trump and even some neoliberal Democrats will try to use infrastructure negotiation as a way of advancing a privatization agenda. For Pelosi, any negotiation that distracts from the push for a genuine single payer health insurance is manna from heaven,

Democrats would be better off advancing their own agenda, including Medicare for all and an infrastructure plan financed and controlled by the public. The time for placating Trump or Congressional Republicans—as by taking impeachment off the table– is long past.

]]>“Free” Markets and the Attack on Democracyhttps://www.juancole.com/2019/04/markets-attack-democracy.html
Wed, 03 Apr 2019 04:08:31 +0000https://www.juancole.com/?p=183237(Informed Comment) – Many US citizens take comfort in the conviction that progress toward democracy has been steady even if stalled or even periodically reversed. History is on our side. Early in the post Revolutionary period the right to vote was extended to all white men, even those who held no property. Women achieved the same privilege early in the twentieth century, and the Civil Rights movement of the sixties completed the work Reconstruction had left undone. The arc of the universe is long, but “it bends toward justice.” I would argue, however, that SCOTUS decisions like Citizens United challenge that easy faith. Nor are they aberrations within the fabric of a generally supportive culture and polity. Our citizens are facing a broad, multifaceted attack on democracy itself. Support for this attack on democracy is also bi- partisan in the sense that some members of both parties, albeit often quietly, support and benefit from this attack.

Confidence that there is no going back is hard to maintain in the face of political controversies today that in many ways replay issues of Reconstruction. To take just one example, the Fifteenth Amendment declares that the right to vote will not be abridged on the grounds of previous condition of servitude.

Radical as the Fifteenth Amendment may seem in the post Civil War context, it represented a compromise. Some representatives of northern states, where in many cases black males were not allowed to vote, did not want to force a change in their own political practices. They rejected a proposed amendment that would have granted the right to vote without regard to race, nativity, property, education, or religious belief. The version of the amendment as enacted says nothing about voter discrimination based on other criteria, such as literacy, or a poll tax.

In the years following Radical Reconstruction most Southern states had in effect availed themselves of the exclusionary practices not constitutionally sanctioned. Some northerners were unwilling to endorse or allow the level of federal intervention that would have been necessary to enforce truly egalitarian outcomes. Many northerners, for their part, turned their attention toward economic expansion in the west and toward industrial development. That development had encouraged and been facilitated by readings of the 14th amendment as granting corporations the status of personhood. Late 19th century decisions protecting the intangible and physical assets of corporate bodies helped encourage a process of corporate consolidation that many saw as a threat to democracy. (I am drawing on Eric Foner’s superb work on Reconstruction)

Fast forward from one Gilded Age to another. Citizens United, granting unions and corporations the right to spend unlimited amounts of money to advocate for and against political candidates, is often regarded as a singularly dangerous challenge to our democratic norms, especially with its infamous assertion that money is speech. Less attention, however, is pad to the context in which this decision occurred, including corporate consolidation in most sectors of the economy, obscene levels of economic inequality, and near religious reverence for deregulated markets. Media consolidation itself has played an enormous role in driving up the cost of political campaigns. How did we get to this second Gilded Age and what lessons can we infer regarding our democratic prospects?

The post World War II decades saw white working class gains in income made possible by unionization, the GI bill, and a federal commitment to full employment. Positive as these gains were, they carried with them unintended consequences. Workers and employers, having less fear of depression, periodically drove wages and prices up. Bursts of inflation and an unprecedented profit squeeze led to unemployment even in the midst of inflation, an unprecedented and unexpected circumstance. Blacks had been left out of the full benefits of the New Deal welfare state and raised demands not only for political equality but also for economic opportunity, one of Reconstruction’s forgotten promises.

These events provided an opening for a group of academics who had long despised the New Deal welfare state. Notre Dame University ‘s Philip Mirowski Never Let a Serious Crisis G to Waste has provided a careful and detailed analysis of this neoliberal movement in American politics.

These neoliberals shared with their nineteenth- century predecessors a faith in markets, but with an important difference. Adam Smith and JS Mill saw markets as non- coercive means to allocate resources and produce goods and services. Neoliberals regarded markets as perfect information processing machines that could provide optimal solutions to all social problems. Hence a commitment not only to lift rent control on housing but also to privatize prisons, water and sewer systems, and to deregulate all aspects of personal finance and treat education and health care as commodities to be pursued on unregulated markets. An essential part of this faith in markets is the post Reagan view of corporate consolidation. Combinations are to be judged only on the basis of cheap products to the consumer. Older antitrust concerns about worker welfare or threat to democracy itself are put aside. Corporate mergers and the emergence of monopoly are seen as reflections of the omniscient market. In practice, however as we shall see, such a tolerant attitude is not applied to worker associations.

Neoliberals differ from their classical predecessors in a second important way. Market is miraculous and a boon to many, but paradoxically only a strong state can assure its arrival and maintenance. Sometimes it may appear that the market is yielding iniquitous or unsustainable outcomes, which my lead to premature or disastrous rejection of its wisdom. The answer to this anger is more markets, but that requires a strong state staffed by neoliberals. They would have the capacity and authority to enact and impose these markets and distract the electorate and divert them into more harmless pursuits. Recognition of the need for a powerful state stands in partial contradiction to the neoliberal’s professed deification of pure markets and was seldom presented to public gatherings. As Mirowski put it, neoliberals operated on the basis of a dual truth, an esoteric truth for its top scholars and theorists and an exoteric version for then public. Celebration of the spontaneous market was good enough for Fox News, whereas top neoliberal scholars discussed how to reengineer government in order to recast society.

The signs ol neoliberalism are all around us. Worried about student debt? There is a widely advertised financial institution that will refinance your loan. Trapped in prison with no money for bail. There are corporations and products that will take care of that. Cancer cures, money for funerals and burial expenses can all be obtained via the market. Any problem the market creates the market can solve. The implications of this view have been ominous for democracy and social justice.

The neoliberal deification of markets has many parents. This mindset encouraged and was encouraged by a revolt against democracy. The wealthy had always been concerned that a propertyless working class might vote to expropriate them, but neoliberalism gave them further reason to bypass democracy. Markets were seen as better indicators of truth than democratic elections, though that point was seldom expressed as directly. Here is FA Hayek’s oblique expression of this concern: “if we proceed on the assumption that only the exercises of freedom that the majority will practice are important, we would be certain to create a stagnant society with all the characteristics of unfreedom.”

The revolt against democracy has occurred on several different levels of the political process. The question of who can vote is just as contested as during Reconstruction, and not just in the South. As during Reconstruction, it does not take the form of explicit racial appeals. The strategy includes further limiting the time polls are open, reduction in the number of polling places, voter identification cards that take time and money to obtain. Who can vote is also a function of the racist legacy of our history, with prohibitions on voting by felons serving to exclude large numbers of potential voters, disproportionately minorities. It should be mentioned more than it is that these techniques also work to the disadvantage of poor whites. Political scientists Walter Dean Burnham and Thomas Ferguson point out: “In Georgia in 1942, for example, turnout topped out at 3.4 percent (that’s right, 3.4 percent; no misprint). Why is no mystery: the Jim Crow system pushed virtually all African-Americans out of the system, while the network of poll taxes, registration requirements, literacy tests and other obstacles that was part of that locked out most poor whites from voting, too. Since the civil rights revolution, turnouts in the South have risen fitfully to national levels, amid much pushback, such as the raft of new voter ID requirements (though these are not limited to the South).”

Minorities, poor, and even substantial segments of the working class are further disadvantaged by efforts to defund the labor opposition. Unions have been the one big money source that Democrats had available, but as the party from Bill Clinton on increasingly became a kind of neoliberalism light, embracing corporate trade agreements with a little bit of job training assistance thrown in, unions lost members, many corporations forced decertification elections. Democrats lost not only financial resources but also the ground troops that had mobilized their voters.

One result of and partial driving force behind these changes is that both parties become big money parties. Burnham and Ferguson-( December 2014)- The President and the Democratic Party are almost as dependent on big money – defined, for example, in terms of the percentage of contributions (over $500 or $1000) from the 1 percent as the Republicans. To expect top down money-driven political parties to make strong economic appeals to voters is idle. Instead the Golden Rule dominates: Money-driven parties emphasize appeals to particular interest groups instead of the broad interests of working Americans that would lead their donors to shut their wallets.

As David Stockman, President Reagan’s Budget Director once all but confessed, “in the modern era the party has never really pretended to have much of a mass constituency. It wins elections by rolling up huge percentages of votes in the most affluent classes while seeking to divide middle and working class voters with various special appeals and striving to hold down voting by minorities and the poor.”

Challenging this bipartisan money driven establishment becomes even more difficult as state level ballot access laws are notoriously hostile to third parties. Add to this the private, deceptively named Presidential Debate Commission, which specializes in depriving even candidates about whom large segment s of the population are curious access to the widely watched debates. Unfortunately the celebrated voting reform proposal, HR1, though containing some democratic initiatives such as early voting and automatic voter registration, makes it own contribution to economic and political consolidation. Bruce Dixon, editor of Black Agenda Report, maintains that only two provisions of this bill are likely to become law and both are destructive: “by raising the qualifying amount from its current level of $5,000 in each of 20 states to $25,000 in 20 states. HR 1 would cut funding for a Green presidential candidate in half, and by making ballot access for a Green presidential candidate impossible in several states it would also guarantee loss of the party’s ability to run for local offices.” Dixon also predicts that some Democrats “will cheerfully cross the aisle to institutionalize the Pentagon, spies and cops to produce an annual report on the threat to electoral security.

Dixon maintains:”Democrats are a capitalist party, they are a government party, and this is how they govern. HR 1 reaches back a hundred years into the Democrat playbook politicians created a foreign menace to herd the population into World War 1, which ended in the Red Scare and a couple of red summers, waves of official and unofficial violence and deportations against US leftists and against black people. The Red Scare led to the founding of the FBI, the core of the nation’s permanent political police…. Fifty years ago these were the same civil servants who gave us the assassinations, the disinformation and illegality of COINTELPRO, and much, much more before that and since then. HR 1 says let’s go to the Pentagon and the cops, let’s order them to discover threats to the electoral system posed by Americans working to save themselves and the planet.”

Dixon is surely right that both parties are capitalist parties, but capitalism itself has taken different forms. New Deal and neoliberal capitalism had far different implications for working class Americans. The New Deal itself was heavily influenced by Norman Thomas and the socialist tradition. In this regard, if what Paul Wellstone used to call the democratic wing of the Democratic Party wishes to see its ideals translated into practice, it must resist efforts to exclude third parties or to deny primary opponents an even playing field.

I am not claiming that there has been a carefully coordinated conspiracy among the individuals and groups that supported these policies, but leaders did act out of a general animus toward popular movements that further reinforced their reverence for corporate markets, and the faith in markets drove the worries about popular movements.

One positive conclusion to be drawn is that if this attack on democracy exists on several levels, activism might be fruitful in many domains and may have a spillover effect. Unions are still not dead, and there is a fight now for the soul of the Democratic Party and that fight might stimulate voter access and eligibility reforms. These in turn could reshape the party’s orientation and ideology. Even at the Federal level Dark money is worrisome to many voters and could be an incentive to mobilize for better disclosure laws. There are ample fronts on which to fight and good reason to keep up the struggle.

]]>Nuclear Brinkmanship is Back: Why We need a New Peace Movementhttps://www.juancole.com/2019/03/nuclear-brinkmanship-movement.html
Wed, 06 Mar 2019 05:15:23 +0000https://www.juancole.com/?p=182658(Informed Comment) – MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) is truly mad. At the height of the Cold War some military analysts and planners maintained that parity in weapons that would destroy civilization prevented either side from resort to those weapons. Parity, however, is a slippery concept, especially in an environment where science and engineering are continually evolving. Each side may have moments when it believes or imagines that it has a decisive edge. Trusting in MAD is especially foolish when the participants still refuse to pledge no first use of atomic or thermonuclear weapons.

MAD poses other dilemmas as well. How do you convince current or potential adversaries that in the event of nuclear attack you will respond in kind? The best and only sure way to show you are serious about and would use nuclear weapons is actually to launch a nuclear attack. But short of that apocalyptic act one can demonstrate proficiency and willingness to act by playing “war games.”

On the surface this may seem a safer outlet for the military’s elevated testosterone, but just as fantasies often morph into ugly acts of aggression, nuclear war games stand on the edge of the real thing. This is especially the case when the games are staged in contested territory and/or during periods of great stress. War games are meant to send a message, but there is often a gap between message sent and message received. The gap can have tragic consequences. Nuclear weapons cannot be used. Winners join the losers in an unlivable world. They need to be abolished. Abrogating INF only fuels the fantasy, which war games help sustain, that such weapons can be employed to win a war.

One war game with cautionary lessons for today is the Able Archer exercise at one of the Cold War’s most tense moments. We learn of this incident only through the diligent work over many years by a nuclear whistle blower,, Nate Jones, director of the Freedom of Information Act Project for the National Security Archive in Washington DC,, The BBC has provided a concise summary of the findings. BBC: According to the fictional scenario behind the Able Archer 83 war game, turmoil in the Middle East was putting a squeeze on Soviet oil supplies.

Meanwhile, Yugoslavia – which wasn’t aligned to either side of the Cold War – decided to back the West. The Soviet leaders in the game feared this would lead to a cascade of other eastern European countries following suit, switching allegiance from the Warsaw Pact to NATO, and putting the entire communist system at risk. The imagined ‘war’ started when Soviet tanks rolled across the border into Yugoslavia. Scandinavia was invaded next, and soon troops were pouring into Western Europe. Overwhelmed, NATO forces were forced into retreat.

A few months after the pretend conflict began, Western governments authorised the use of nuclear weapons. Role-playing NATO forces launched a single medium range nuclear missile, wiping Ukrainian capital Kiev from the map. It was deployed as a signal, a warning that NATO was prepared to escalate the war. The theory was that this ‘nuclear signalling’ would help cooler heads to prevail. It didn’t work.By 11 November 1983, global nuclear arsenals had been unleashed. Most of the world was destroyed. “

The kicker in this BBC story, the part US nuclear planners fought so hard to withhold, is what was actually occurring on the Soviet side. In 1983, the leader of the Soviet Union was Yuri Andropov. As BBC put it, he was: “A former head of the KG he wasas seriously ill. And seriously paranoid.”

I find the choice of the noun paranoia misleading, a word that reduces the policy issues to highly personal virtues or pathologies. As even the BBC points out suspicions were intensified by war gamers’ determination to make the play as close to the real thing as possible, right down to wheeling out pretend nuclear warheads, use of encrypted messages, and periods of total silence., all warlike actions. BBC reports that the Soviet response was to ground all flights and begin a process of prioritizing targets.

Fortunately this time around even Reagan and Thatcher became appalled when they learned of this incident. The fears that it evoked – along with the rise of Gorbachev and a growing anti-nuclear movement–played a role in incentivizing retreat from nuclear brinksmanship. It does, however, raise issues that are just as salient today.

Why does the national security establishment work so hard to conceal information about this old war game? Surely the Russians are fully aware of this near miss. The only conclusion I draw is that concerns about war games and accidental nuclear war would give aid and comfort to anti-nuclear movements here and around the world.

Besides the grave risks of miscalculation, don’t these “games” run the long- term danger of normalizing these weapons? Just another part of the arsenal to be trotted out at the appropriate time.

Unfortunately, at least until recently, superiority in nuclear weaponry has been an article of faith for both political parties. As Daniel Ellsberg has pointed out, every President since Truman has wanted to assert and preserve nuclear superiority as a bargaining chip. In addition, military contracting is a disproportionately generous source of corporate profits and campaign contributions. Thus bipartisanship is alive and well on issues that pose an existential threat to all life on this planet. At the least advocates of the Green New Deal should elevate nuclear arms reduction and rapid elimination to an immediate concern.

Former Boston Globe columnist James Carroll highlights one very promising endeavor that Green New Deal advocates should consider joining. : “ In 2017, the Union of Concerned Scientists, together with Physicians for Social Responsibility, launched Back from the Brink: The Call to Prevent Nuclear War, “a national grassroots initiative seeking to fundamentally change U.S. nuclear weapons policy and lead us away from the dangerous path we are on.” Back From the Brink and Green New Deal share concerns and many policy objectives. The enthusiasm of each can reverberate back and forth, lending more strength to both.

Nuclear modernization is one of the most wasteful aspects of a bloated military budget and drains the economy of persons and resources needed to mitigate the damage climate change is already inflicting. The Cold War is over. Nuclear weapons did not win it. Spend that money on the other gravest threat to our existence.

]]>Resetting the Nuclear Doomsday Clockhttps://www.juancole.com/2019/02/resetting-nuclear-doomsday.html
Tue, 19 Feb 2019 07:22:32 +0000https://www.juancole.com/?p=182339(Informed Comment) – Earlier this year the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists reset its famous doomsday clock to 2 minutes to midnight. Though the journal’s concerns about nuclear war and/or climate catastrophe were well taken, they received little media attention beyond some discussion of the perils of pulling out of the Iran nuclear deal. And although Trump occasioned the most recent concerns, media never acknowledged the role of long- standing US nuclear policy in fostering a dangerous nuclear arms race.

The Bulletin indicted: “Although the United States and North Korea moved away from the bellicose rhetoric of 2017, the urgent North Korean nuclear dilemma remains unresolved. Meanwhile, the world’s nuclear nations proceeded with programs of “nuclear modernization” that are all but indistinguishable from a worldwide arms race, and the military doctrines of Russia and the United States have increasingly eroded the long-held taboo against the use of nuclear weapons.”

In regard to nuclear “modernization,” three points are vital. Modernization of our nuclear arsenal is unfortunately a bipartisan commitment. Throughout the Cold War and beyond both parties have collaborated in the quantitative and qualitative expansion of the arms race. President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton supported a thirty- year trillion dollar program of nuclear weapons development.

Secondly, the term modernization is a dangerous euphemism. What the nuclear advocates want is nuclear weapons they can use. The idea is that deployment of the current arsenal of nuclear weapons is unthinkable because these are orders of magnitude more potent than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, As many have argued in the years since Hiroshima the winners would envy the dead.

The confidence one could win a war by employing the most sophisticated min nukes is the height of hubris. Former Boston Globe columnist James Carroll makes this cogent point as to why even many military leaders are reluctant to advocate their use: ” In fact, the elimination of tactical nukes represented a hard-boiled confrontation with the iron law of escalation, another commander’s insight — that any use of such a weapon against a similarly armed adversary would likely ignite an inevitable chain of nuclear escalation whose end point was barely imaginable. One side was never going to take a hit without responding in kind, launching a process that could rapidly spiral toward an apocalyptic exchange.”

Much of the momentum behind the Cold War lay in this chain of nuclear escalation. (Carroll properly reminds us that Truman’s key scientific advisors argued again both development and testing of the hydrogen bomb. Truman’s decision to override them led Russia to follow. It was fear of escalation of this sort that led to the Intermediate Forces Treaty.

In order to respond to US nuclear- armed missile potentially launched from essentially invulnerable Trident submarines the Soviets developed intermeate range missiles targeted on London among other cities. When weapons of this sort are deployed in Europe and Russiathe stakes and the dangers escalate. Sensing an incoming launch the target nation has fewer than five minutes to decide whether to fire his quiver or risk losing his entire retaliatory capability.

Scrapping treaties that govern strategic and intermediate range missiles is sure to encourage renewal of an 80s style nuclear arms race Though most experts deem targets in Western Europe unlikely today, China remains a distinct possibility—especially as tensions over trade and commercial services intensify. . Though it is not party to START it has not embarked on any major intermediate missile program. That would likely change in the event of dramatic nuclear escalation in Europe.

In addition to the mini-nukes to be loaded onto missiles on Trident nuclear subs, Trump is also advocating a modernized anti missile defense system, a program resembling Reagan’s so called Star Wars initiative. Criticisms of this concept have generally centered on its cost and/or technical feasibility. It is better looked on as another escalation of the nuclear arms race

No serious nuclear analyst believes any anti missile system for the foreseeable future would succeed in the face of a full scale Russian attack. But in the event of a US first strike which knocked out most of Russian capacity, might an anti missile system succeed against the weakened Russian response? As the blog Moon of Alabama puts it,”

Russia, like other countries, feared that the U.S. would come to believe that it could launch a large first strike against Russia’s strategic weapons and use its missile defense to prevent being hit by a smaller Russian retaliation strike? This upset the balance of Mutual Assured Destruction that has prevented a large scale nuclear war. Such is the kind of tortured speculation and dangerous techno-optimism that emerges when military planners, operating in secret, don’t or won’t acknowledge that nuclear weapons change everything.

]]>Labor Strikes, once Blunted by GOP and Corporations, are Back and Shaping Public Policyhttps://www.juancole.com/2019/02/strikes-blunted-corporations.html
Thu, 07 Feb 2019 06:03:47 +0000https://www.juancole.com/?p=182089If President Trump does try to start back up the government shutdown this month, he may face an insuperable obstacle. Just days before the (temporary?) ending of the government shutdown long time left scholar and activist Barbara Ehrenreich and former Teamster organizer Gary Stevenson urged TSA workers to go out on strike. Days later Sara Nelson, flight attendant union president, doubled down on Ehrenreich’s request by calling for a General Strike.: “Go back with the Fierce Urgency of NOW to talk with your Locals and International unions about all workers joining together – To End this Shutdown with a General Strike.”

How much of a role declining air service and/or the possibility of a broad walkout played in ending the shutdown is not clear. These events did, however, illustrate the vulnerabilities of our air traffic systems and the growing leverage workers might enjoy. As Ehrenreich and Stevenson pointed out, these workers actually do possess substantial leverage, something most working class members have been unable to say for over a generation now.

In any future battle TSA workers must balance their leverage against the risks they would face by going on strike. Put briefly, over any labor strike, especially by government workers, the ghost of PATCO hangs heavily. When the professional air traffic controllers went on strike early in the presidency of Ronald Reagan, he ordered the firing of these workers and their replacement by military air traffic controllers.

Though most do jobs requiring less demanding skills, the current TSA personnel are not easily replaced en mass. Commercial air traffic would be brought to a standstill for several weeks. Though some—including me—might hope that such an eventuality would elicit a complete re-examination of the whole airline security system, such a result is unlikely. We are far more likely to die in an auto on our way to the airport than be murdered by a terrorist. Are these pat downs and scans not a serious diminution of our freedom?

What the Ehrenreich op ed as well as the individual actions by TSA personnel (declarations of illness and/or financial hardship) may do is lead to a broader discussion of the role of strikes in labor conflict. As capital became more mobile and global in the early seventies and as labor made an easy target for concerns about inflation, the strike headed toward extinction. Union density within the workforce steadily shrunk. Givebacks to management became the order of the day. In many states neoliberal legislatures and governors enacted prohibitions on strikes by public sector workers

The ground, however, may be shifting and teachers may be leading the way. Ehrenreich’s and Stevenson’s friendly suggestion that TSA collectively walk off the job is played against a backdrop of mass teacher strikes in red states, Oklahoma and West Virginia and blue Chicago and LA.

These strikes offer some lessons. Though low wages are one target, the strikes have been focused on demands that have a major impact on the quality of classroom instruction, including class size, modern textbooks, adequate support personnel, especially school nurses. More broadly these strikes have been an occasion to contest the whole issues of charter schools and the threat they pose to the very ideal of public education. When public schools are underfunded, for whatever reason, their poor performance can then be cited as justification for further expansion of the unregulated charter school empires. In an era dominated by neoliberal economics, such a strategy has been applied worldwide to such public health institution as the US VA and Canadian Medicare.

TSA personnel were not making outrageous demands. The request that they receive their already low wages on a timely basis was understood and accepted by public. I would hope that in the event of future strikes there will be more attention to the difficulties in performing one’s job as food and childcare become harder to obtain. Will there be a future strike? Perhaps this is another lesson from the teachers. In WV and Oklahoma agitation for collective action came from the rank and file, with leaders only reluctantly tagging along. Whether this will be the case here remains to be seen, but these are volatile times.

Even within the private sector there are stirrings we have not heard in many years. Long time labor activist Kim Moody points out that competition and consolidation of supply chains controls costs by eliminating redundancy but also makes just in time systems vulnerable to work disruptions. Perhaps the strike is not really extinct.

]]>Is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Right that Tax Justice is Key to our Democratic Prospect?https://www.juancole.com/2019/01/alexandria-democratic-prospect.html
Wed, 09 Jan 2019 06:30:22 +0000https://www.juancole.com/?p=181388There is surprisingly widespread support for higher taxes on the rich. Americans have typically felt that one should keep what one earns. Many are also convinced that they will one day become rich, hence the popularity of lotteries, which reflect and help sustain that belief. Dean Baker, co-founder of the Center for Economic Policy and Research, has argued repeatedly that the best egalitarian strategy is to remove the elements of monopoly power in the so called free market so that incomes might be fairly distributed. I believe this argument is sound, but ending such practices as patent monopolies for drugs might be an even harder reach now than enacting a more just tax structure.

The degree of inequality in both wealth and income is the most extreme in our history. Nomi Prins, former Goldman Sachs executive and long time critic of big finance puts it thus: “i(I)fyou really want to grasp what’s been happening, consider that, between 2009 and 2017, the number of billionaires whose combined wealth was greater than that of the world’s poorest 50% fell from 380 to just eight. And… despite claims by the president that every other country is screwing America, the U.S. leads the pack when it comes to the growth of inequality. As Inequality.org notes, it has “much greater shares of national wealth and income going to the richest 1% than any other country.”

The behavior of those at the top contradicts many of the ideological defenses of this obscenely inegalitarian capitalism. Reductions in the corporate income tax have been followed by stock buybacks rather than new investments. These enrich shareholders but fail to create jobs. Manufacturers have been downsizing. Nonetheless, Donald Trump’s outrageous tax reform has had the inadvertent effect of stirring closer examination of the distributional impact of federal taxes. The Trump/Republican tax cut has been so unpopular that Republicans chose not to run on it.

The quest for a just tax system is aided by the clarity and care with which it has been presented. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has explained that top “marginal rate” applies only to income above the threshold. Most progressive tax proposals apply the top rate only to incomes above several million dollars. This tax would have little effect on even the relatively high income level attorney or physician. There is so much wealth and income parked among a few at the top that sums in the neighborhood of 100 billion a year can be raised quite easily.

Embed from Getty ImagesBillionaire Sheldon Adelson, chairman and chief executive officer of Las Vegas Sands Corp., stands during a Presidential Medal of Freedom ceremony in the East Room of the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., on Friday, Nov. 16, 2018. President Donald Trump awarded the nation’s highest civilian honor to an eclectic group of seven recipients including living political allies and long-dead American icon and also political figures with close ties to the president. Photographer: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images.

Still, we have to be careful in how we make these arguments. Even constructive policy agendas are supported in part by misleading or inaccurate assertions. Defenders have pointed out that the US economy enjoyed sound and rapid growth over many decades with top marginal rates far higher than today. True enough, but during those years the tax code had innumerable deductions and credits. Any executive paying anywhere near the tope marginal rate should have fired his accountant. Marginal rates surely can safely be increased well beyond today’s, but attempts to reach Eisenhower Administration levels would invite a stampede to open up new deductions.

Progressive must also avoid attributing too much causal significance to tax policy. The relative success of Capitalism’s golden age, 1945 to 1970, depended heavily on a complex, hard to predict admixture of strong unions, infrastructure development, Cold War fears, and cheap natural resources. Equally important was the willingness of some segments of capital to accept limits to its wealth and power. In addition, fiscal policy, including the willingness to engage in deficit spending on behalf of those infrastructure investments both enhanced productivity and stimulated relatively high levels of employment.

There are, in addition, some outright bad arguments being used on behalf of this tax reform. Government does not necessarily need to raise taxes in order to finance a Green New Deal or other worthy projects. For one thing the evidence is that green energy increasingly pays for itself and it is now cheaper to build and operate a new solar or wind farm in some states than to continue to operate a coal-fired electricity plant. Moreover, the US government prints its own currency and cannot go bankrupt. It does face constraints, those being the workers, resources, and technologies available. Despite all the talk of recovery, there is still much slack in the real economy. This is in part because the money from the Trump tax cut went into financial market speculation and stock buy- backs. Had these funds purchased real investment in plants, worker training, and new technologies we might be experiencing faster growth but more significant inflation.

If the money spent on a Green New Deal does lead to some inflation (a fate far better than unemployment), then taxation of those at the top would be in order all the more. Nonetheless, activists should not wait around for progressive taxes to fund badly needed priorities. I can imagine a scenario in which Republicans and centrist Democrats derail these badly needed initiatives as “good ideas but we can’t afford them.” The planet and poor and working class citizens worldwide are already paying too high a price for such procrastination.

Perhaps the most compelling argument for serious tax reform is political. The vast accumulation of wealth at the top is matched by inordinate concentrations of political power. Even before Citizens United, money was speech. A little more equitable distribution of money might also re- energize and re-legitimize our democracy.